perhaps tongue-in-cheek, to at least one New
Testament passage that many historians find
problematic: Jews under Roman rule demanding yet another of their own be executed in a
horrific manner. Historians often suspect that
this story has less to do with what actually happened and more to do with the aim of later Gospel
authors to shift blame away from the Romans. 8
Kilworth, then, highlights genuine inquiries
about the nature of biblical stories.

Science fiction also imagines the possible future of religion, as alluded to above.
Frank Herbert conceives of an intensely
religious future in his Dune novels, whose
first installment appeared in 1965. The
stories follow a family fulfilling messianic
roles on a distant planet thousands of
years from now. Star Trek (in all its permutations on TV and later in novels and
movies) tends to portray humanity’s future
as secular, with no chaplains on Starfleet
vessels and no overt religiosity. Yet like

Dune it ponders the possibility that hu-mans (and/or other intelligent beings)could in essence become gods. If mortalbeings (whether through evolutionaryprocesses or technological interventions)develop the ability to control matter withtheir minds, teleport from place to place,and prolong their lives beyond the normalrange, then the question arises: Will these traitsmeld with traditional definitions of divinity?George Zebrowski takes this possibility to thenth degree in his 1979 science-fiction novel,Macrolife, an epic also set in the future. In it, allintelligences combine into one collective, whichmanages to survive the destruction of our uni-verse in a “Big Crunch” and then waits expec-tantly, uttering hopefully, “Let there be light,” asthe cosmos rebounds and the process beginsagain. This aggregate merges with an even great-er collective intelligence that had survived in asimilar way through previous universes’ deathsand rebirths over the epochs. Through the echoto the first chapter of Genesis, Zebrowski hintsthat the “God” of a universe might simply be anintelligence that emerged out of previous ones.

Indeed, science fiction has always had room
for natural gods: beings not independent from the
universe but which become godlike (such as the
foppish self-styled general Trelane in “The Squire
of Gothos” in a 1967 episode of StarTrek) and
akin to the powerful but not all-powerful entities
of traditional human polytheistic religions (such
as Ra of the Egyptians, himself a character in
Stargate). In Ray Bradbury’s story “The Fire Balloons,” from his 1951 collection The Illustrated Man,
human priests go to Mars to evangelize its surviving
natives. But the beings have no need of the message, since they long transcended bodily existence,
and, therefore, sin. In the end, the mission leader requests permission to return to learn from the spiritually evolved beings on some future occasion. If
we ever encounter more advanced races in the universe, it seems inevitable, to Bradbury and others,
that we will embrace their religious views as well. 9

Losing belief, finding faith?

Granted, the goal of some science fiction, nomatter the genre, is escapism. But broaching sa-cred themes through the manipulation of timeprovides useful thought experiments about thenature of faith in the 21st century. What would ittake to make us lose our faith? Or find faith? Orchange faith?

For instance, if we went back in time to the
tomb where Jesus was buried to see the biblical
resurrection, what, if anything, would we
witness? Would we behold angels rolling back the
stone and Jesus exiting bodily? Or would we perhaps be mistaken for angels and become part of,
and the cause of, the story that we had wanted to
investigate? What would the significance be for
worldviews today if such scenarios came to pass?

Another set of questions arising from the
mingling of religion and science fiction pertains
to the nature of faith. If faith is defined as belief
that certain things happened in the past, then
how does such belief relate to the appearance of
evidence and the conclusion of historians? And
if through time travel we get to see for ourselves
what happened, would our becoming eyewitnesses “prove” faith or, by transforming faith
into sight, undermine it?

Theologian Paul Tillich argues against the
identification of faith with belief, defining faith
instead as ultimate concern (i.e.: the supreme
focus on which a human life centers). Time travel to the past, or future, might affect our beliefs.
But if time travel (and what we discover about
the past and/or future as a result) causes us to
lose our faith, to abandon our core values and
commitments, then our belief system is our
abiding interest, not God, and not infinite reality. Tillich would classify the treatment of any
belief system as ultimate — even his own Christian one — as idolatry. 10

The future is now?

Bottom line, science fiction is less about thefuture or past and more about our reflections onthem. This type of speculation can be fascinat-ing and meaningful, not merely diverting or ac-ademic. Such rumination is one reason why the“flashes sideways” in Lost enthrall some fansand scholars and confound others. For no mat-ter what had been rendered, would any afterlifemake the characters’ decisions and experiencesin this life more or less consequential? No. Infact, one figure, granted a peek of his afterlifevia exposure to a high level of electromagnetism,initially thinks that the better world he had seenmade this one unimportant. But later he chang-es his mind. So, too, in many religious tradi-tions today, an afterlife has been presented as ahope for the eventual accomplishment of justiceand a final achievement of perfection.Yet these pious delineations of what thatexistence might be trouble some philoso-phers and theologians in much the waythat the ending of Lost does for its nay-sayers. For if such an after-existence rep-resents a finality, then it would have to in-volve our ceasing to be the dynamic andchanging entities we are now — in whichcase, can it really be “us” that continue toexist? 11 And if that postmortem existenceis not radically different than our own,then can it offer any sort of resolution tothe aspects of our present existence thatworry us?So science fiction is a wonderful win-dow into how humans perceive religion inthe present. While some people debate theliteral truth of stories about past miracles,other people regard truth as somethingdeeper, something not susceptible to con-firmation or disconfirmation as a result of newdiscoveries, whether derived from time travel oran archaeologist’s spade. While some of us hopethat a powerful entity will come along to savehumanity, others of us wonder how we can riseto the challenge and attain not merely the tech-nological capability, but also the moral excel-lence, to fill that role ourselves. Science fiction,then, serves as an excellent starting point forconversations about our faith in the future andabout the future of our faiths.

James F. McGrath is Associate Professor
of Religion and the Clarence L. Goodwin
Chair of New Testament Language
and Literature at Butler University. He
specializes in religion and science fiction,
religion and science, the New Testament,
and Mandaeism. His works include

The Burial of Jesus: What Does History Have to Do with Faith,
2nd ed. (Patheos Press, 2012), The Only True God: Early Christian
Monotheism in Its Jewish Context (University of Illinois Press,
2009), and John’s Apologetic Christology: Legitimation and
Development in Johannine Christology, part of the Society
for New Testament Studies monograph series (Cambridge
University Press, 2001). McGrath also coedited, with Andrew
Crome, Time and Relative Dimensions in Faith: Religion and
“Doctor Who” (Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2013) and edited
Religion and Science Fiction (Pickwick Publications, 2011).
McGrath further writes scholarly articles, book reviews, book
chapters and pieces for mainstream media and blogs at his site
Exploring Our Matrix. He earned an undergraduate diploma
in religious studies from University of Cambridge, a B.D. from
University of London, and a Ph.D. in religion from University of
Durham. Email him at jfmcgrat@butler.edu.

MGM/Photofest

Human slaves of alien gods erect a time portal in the 1994 film Stargate.